The First Fall Classic

by Mike Vaccaro

  “Secretary McRoy ordered me at one o’clock to throw the section open,” Goode explained over the growing tide of acrimony. “He said he couldn’t be sure that the Rooters were going to honor their tickets.”

  Keenan listened in astonishment.

  “McRoy? He told you to sell our tickets, a carpetbagger from Chicago? And you listened to him?”

  Goode wasn’t inclined to have a debate. The game was already supposed to start. Joe Wood was already warmed up. The other 30,000 people, dispersed elsewhere in the ballpark, started murmuring testily. And the people in the Rooters’ usual seats, who really had bought their tickets honestly, were hardly inclined to budge.

  “Well,” Keenan said, “we aren’t going anywhere either.”

  And then it got strange: From far down the field, a shout went up and in an instant a half a dozen mounted horsemen appeared, their steeds speeding toward left field, charging full tilt, intending to scatter the Rooters, the horses kicking up the dirt and grass of the carefully manicured infield, pounding divots into the outfield, all the ballplayers watching this unfold with bemused smiles on their faces. One especially interested observer, sitting in a VIP box behind the home-team dugout, immediately stormed the field himself, waddling out toward left field.

  “This is an outrage!” John Fitzgerald boomed. “An outrage!”

  A good ten minutes had passed. Heinie Wagner, red-faced, breathless, sprinted to where Keenan was standing. “This game will be forfeited if we don’t get going the right way,” the Red Sox shortstop said. “And if the crowd comes on the field again the umpires will declare the Giants the winner. They just told me so.”

  Keenan looked at Wagner in disbelief, unable to fathom that this player to whom the Rooters had given such unconditional devotion would turn on them. “We are not responsible for this state of affairs. We came here expecting to find our seats and they are taken. We don’t blame the people in them—they have a right to them as well as we have. But where are we going to go? What can we do? It is not the fault of the Rooters and it is not the Rooters who are causing the troubles. We will do everything within our power to let the game go on and you can rest assured every member of the Rooters party will assist you in every way they can.”

  It wasn’t until Honey Fitz made it to the scene that order was finally restored. The Rooters reluctantly agreed to a compromise: They would stand wherever room allowed. That would mean no chants, no songs, nothing resembling the atmosphere they’d contributed their hearts, souls, and voices to. “I will deal with Mr. McRoy and Mr. McAleer later,” Fitzgerald promised his most ardent constituents. “And they will rue the day they picked a fight with the Royal Rooters.”

  Finally it was time to play ball, and Billy Evans said so (again), and Smoky Joe Wood shook his head (again). You couldn’t make this stuff up if you tried.

  No video exists of what followed next, and only a handful of grainy photographs have made it through the better part of a century, and all of the participants are, to quote Casey Stengel, dead at the present time. There is no way to judge with certitude what precisely was lurking in the hearts of the Boston Red Sox as Smoky Joe Wood threw his first pitch of the afternoon toward Josh Devore, a straight, soft meatball of a misnamed fastball that bisected the heart of the plate for a strike and left Devore stunned and John McGraw wide-eyed with fanatical glee.

  “He has nothing!” McGraw yelped from the third-base dugout. “Get your hitting shoes on, boys, because he has nothing! Get after that fastball!” It was all McGraw could do to not run from the coaching box and grab a bat himself. Devore obliged, swung at the next pitch, pounded the ball into the ground toward shortstop, and beat the throw to first. Devore had been so anxious, his hands so attuned to Wood’s fastballs, which normally dripped gasoline, that he’d almost overswung. He joined McGraw’s chorus, yelling toward Larry Doyle, “Cappy, he has nothing! He has nothing!” Doyle would discover that soon enough on his own, lining a clean single toward center that seemed to lift a thousand-ton building from his shoulders and put the Giants very much in business.

  Fred Snodgrass stepped to the plate, only half believing what his manager and his teammates were saying about the great Smoky Joe Wood, who’d already struck him out twice in this series, who’d limited him to only one hit in eight at-bats so far, the base-knock coming his first time up in the first game when he’d spun a ball into the dirt at home plate and beaten the throw, a ball that traveled, tops, eleven feet. But Snodgrass’s eyes wouldn’t lie to him, and he described later on what Wood’s first offering to him looked like.

  “A lob,” Snodgrass said. “Like something you’d get in batting practice, only slower, and softer.”

  Snodgrass laid off, the ball drifted outside, and then he stepped out of the box, noticing Doyle at first and Devore at second exchange knowing glances, and Snodgrass knew what that meant: a double steal. No matter how slow the next pitch was, he would keep his bat on his shoulder, give the runners a chance to advance. What he didn’t expect—what no one in their right mind could expect—was what happened next: Inexplicably, Wood started into his full windup. Understand that since the beginning of baseball time, pitchers have always thrown from the “stretch” position with men on base; it prevents runners from having their way on the base paths. It is something pitchers do from sandlots to semipro all the way to the big leagues. It is as basic a fundamental as running. And yet, somehow, Joe Wood wound up, either forgetting there were two runners on base or—worse—not caring.

  Devore slid into third and Doyle into second before Wood’s big, sweeping curve could even reach Hick Cady’s mitt. It was inconceivable. It practically disgusted Larry Doyle, grateful for the gift but easily pushed to anger whenever a player lost his head on the field.

  “Wood couldn’t have gotten by in the bush leagues on a dark day with what he had,” Doyle would assert. “And that goes for his brain as well as his arm.”

  Snodgrass badly wanted in on the action and he all but licked his lips as Wood delivered his next pitch, another straight fastball. Snodgrass stayed back on the ball as long as he could and then pounced, smacking a hard line drive down the right-field line that scored Devore and Doyle, nudging the Giants out to another early first-inning lead, and quieting most of Fenway Park—all but that segment of irate Royal Rooters who suddenly couldn’t be more delighted by any misfortune that visited the home team. They cheered lustily.

  Wood wasn’t himself, wasn’t even remotely resembling a major league pitcher, and the malaise was spreading. Red Murray laid down a bunt, an odd decision by a cleanup hitter, and it rolled right for Jake Stahl at first but the Sox’ player-manager, already stunned by what he was watching, nearly forgot to field it, recovered, then barely beat the hard-charging Murray by half a foot. Up stepped Fred Merkle, who lofted what looked to be a routine fly ball toward the normally sure-handed Duffy Lewis in left field, but the wind started blowing it back toward the infield and Lewis nearly twisted himself into a pretzel trying to track it down, and couldn’t. When it landed with a thud in short left field, Snodgrass raced home with the third run and Merkle was standing on second base. Wood had thrown exactly eight pitches and the Giants already led 3–0. It looked like Wood would finally stanch the bleeding on his ninth pitch, another fat fastball that Buck Herzog drilled up the middle. The ball bounded hard off the sod, smacked into Wood’s glove almost by accident, and the overeager Merkle (who else?) wandered too far off third base and was eventually thrown out in a rundown. But Herzog took second base on the play, and he immediately scored the fourth run of the game when Chief Meyers stroked a single—again on a first-pitch fastball.

  “Look at him,” Jeff Tesreau, the Giants starting pitcher who was delighted with such early run support, exclaimed on the Giants’ bench, pointing at Wood, who seemed oddly serene considering the beating he was absorbing, “there must be something wrong with his arm.”

  Wilbert Robinson, the old coach who’d seen about 2,000 more professional baseball ga
mes in his time than young Tesreau, spit out a stream of tobacco, and crossed his legs, and replied, “Or his head.”

  The Red Sox were ruined. Art Fletcher lined another first-pitch fastball for a single to right field, and the slow-footed Meyers should have been dead at third base when Harry Hooper’s throw beat him by about ten steps. But Larry Gardner couldn’t handle the throw, then couldn’t pick the ball up in time to tag Meyers before he finally poured himself into third base. The Giants’ catcher picked himself up, dusted himself off and trotted home when Tesreau scalded still another first-pitch fastball up the middle, “the hardest-hit ball I’ve ever hit in my life,” he would report, “and the hardest-hit ball I ever expect to hit in my life.” Five-nothing. One pitch later it was six, when Tesreau took off from first base trying to steal, got himself caught in a rundown, and stayed in it long enough for Fletcher to dash home from third a second or two before Tesreau was finally tagged out to end an inning that never seemed like it was ever going to end.

  It was a surreal moment for everyone. Even the revenge-minded Rooters couldn’t bring themselves to cheer any longer, because this wasn’t just a beating, it was a battering, a smearing of the great Smoky Joe Wood, who incredibly, almost unbelievably, had thrown all of thirteen pitches in the inning. Thirteen! It was an appalling display on many different levels, the most sinister of which helped empty almost half of the Fenway Park grandstand before the Red Sox were even finished with their first turn at bat. On one hand, few wanted to believe the Speed Boys would be so audacious as to throw a World Series game in front of 32,694 witnesses, even those who knew what a highly motivated band of vigilantes the Sox might have been, seeking both visceral revenge for their owner’s sabotage and financial gain if they’d all decided to bet the Giants at the long local odds still being offered that morning. On the other hand, few could believe that a team that had won 105 regular-season games and had been so clearly the dominant of the two teams for the Series’ first five games would be this bad, could be this bad.

  Wood was the most obvious culprit, of course, since he plainly had enough motivation to take part in a conspiracy if he’d wanted to, thanks to his brother’s fiscal loss and his own anger at being replaced as the Game Six starter to benefit McAleer’s fiscal greed. And later in his career, Wood would be implicated alongside Ty Cobb and Tris Speaker with betting a game they all knew was fixed in 1919, less than two weeks before the Black Sox scandal that nearly drove the sport out of business. But there were others, too. There was Duffy Lewis’s shaky pursuit of the fly ball. There was Larry Gardner’s suspect error. Most important, there was the fact that the Red Sox never did mount a serious threat after falling behind so early, falling meekly 11–4 and setting up an eighth and decisive game.

  “We finally looked like a real club today, and the Red Sox didn’t look very much like one,” Larry Doyle said when it was over, after he’d justified his manager’s faith in him by collecting three hits, including the Giants’ first home run of the Series in the sixth. “We are a whole lot nearer to that winner’s money today than we were Saturday, and we have also given Smoky Joe Wood a terrible trimming. Now for the big battle: one game, winner take all. Just like it ought to be.”

  The Red Sox, for their part, didn’t sound the part of a team that had just been taken to the woodshed. Even Joe Wood, whom you would have expected to seem shell-shocked beyond recognition (assuming he was, in fact, “shocked” by what had happened to him), was downright sanguine.

  “I had all my usual stuff,” he insisted, “but perhaps I was too confident. Those Giants batters just stood up there and banged away at a fast one, the curve, and my slow one. I will be back in there this afternoon if the manager says the word. There is nothing the matter with my arm.”

  James McAleer, meanwhile, fresh from canceling his victory celebration and locking his best champagne in the cellar, was spinning wildly when reporters caught up to him, many of them more suspicious than ever that he was more marionette than martinet now, that he’d pulled these strings all along.

  “Nonsense,” McAleer said. “I believe that Wood was bothered considerably by the heavy gale which blew directly in his face. He couldn’t get his curve ball working and for some reason his speed was lacking. Something evidently was wrong with him, and when he found he had nothing he became bullheaded and just sailed the ball over the plate trusting in his fielders to pull him out of the mire. If Wood had been at his best we couldn’t have lost today.”

  Then, in either a Freudian slip or a who-gives-a-shit glimpse of arrogance that too many Red Sox had seen too often lately, he said, “I haven’t decided whether to start Bedient or Wood tomorrow but you can bank on one thing: the Red Sox will be there fighting for the victory until the last man has been retired.”

  Jake Stahl, who was the man ostensibly charged with making that decision, figured that his owner had done enough talking for the both of them.

  “I’ll worry about tomorrow, tomorrow,” he said. “I have enough things to worry about right now.”

  He wasn’t the only one.

  Giants fans had all but taken to the streets when word swirled around the city of their team’s first-inning explosion. At Madison Square Garden, an engineer had to be called in because the six-run first inning had made people wonder if the floor wasn’t really shaking (it wasn’t). The engineer was called again when the gathering exploded once more; when fan favorite Doyle’s home run was announced, many were convinced the foundation had cracked (it hadn’t). Uptown, at the Imperial Hotel overlooking the Hudson River, the biggest Giants fan of all, John T. Brush, was nearly overcome with emotion as scoring updates were relayed to him minute by minute. Brush had been feeling well enough during Games One and Four to actually spend the games in a parking area beyond the outfield fence, but he’d grown too weak to do the same for Game Six, and much as he’d have given anything to make the trip to Boston for the deciding game, he knew that would not be possible. Still, he was reported to be “ecstatic” by his club’s resilience.

  Everywhere else that ecstasy was evident and it was deafening, and it nearly caused a riot in Herald Square, where close to 55,000 people had kept a steady vigil for the sixth time in the past seven days. The choking crowds had finally become too much for a shopkeeper who shared Broadway with the Herald and the Telegram, and he’d filed a complaint with the Tenderloin Police Station accusing Frank B. Flaherty, circulation manager of the Herald, of maintaining a “public nuisance.” Captain Harold Thor had personally come to arrest Flaherty that morning as the crowd in the streets—and the crowd above the streets, lining the neighboring windows and rooftops—booed. Later that day, before Magistrate Lawrence Barlow in Jefferson Market Court, the anonymous shopkeeper pled his case and Flaherty argued his.

  Barlow, who declared he “had no interest in who wins this world’s series,” nevertheless issued a verdict that was music to the ears of baseball fans across the city. “If you will produce the necessary evidence against the owners or operators of all the bulletin boards and display advertising signs in the city in a form which will require that I consider the issuance of warrants for all I shall take this matter under advisement. I certainly shall not take any action in this case alone. The case is dismissed and the prisoner discharged.”

  Yes, it was a good day all around for the Giants.

  The Red Sox? Their problems seemed to mount by the hour. Somehow, someway, someone had found a way to alienate the most passionately loyal fans in the country, fans who put not only their hearts but their wallets behind the Red Sox and earlier in the day had been thanked for their fealty with the back of Fenway Park’s hand. When Game Seven was over, the Royal Rooters made their displeasure known by playing Tessie, as always, but then they marched over to the extreme left end of the grandstand and one of the rooters, William Shea, produced a megaphone.

  “Three cheers for Secretary McRoy of Chicago!” he cried.

  Booooooooooo! Booooooooooo! Booooooooooo!

  “Well
then! Three cheers for the Giants, and for their management!”

  The grounds shook from the cheering.

  No less a studied eye than the one belonging to the Globe’s Tim Murnane instantly declared this the lowest point in the history of Boston baseball, the moment when the Red Sox had not only humiliated themselves on the field but distanced themselves from the very people who’d helped make them such a civic phenomenon. Murnane followed the Rooters as they retraced their steps back to Raleigh and Beacon, then disbanded—forever, if you believed some of the angrier rooters, especially those who chose to cool their heels (and moisten their parched voice boxes) at McGreevy’s Third Base Saloon.

  Theirs was a noble complaint, instantly picked up by empathetic voices.

  “Secretary McRoy—who is from Chicago—should be retired from all connection with the Boston Baseball Club and a Boston man who understands conditions here given the place,” roared Mayor Fitzgerald, who vowed he would sooner step foot in a Republican clubhouse than Fenway Park for Game Eight after what the Red Sox had done. “Boston money supports the club and there is certainly enough baseball brains in Boston to furnish a secretary. It seems a pity, when New York has been willing to set aside 300 seats for the Rooters that the home club could not be equally courteous. If the owners of the Boston club know their business, a Boston man will be found in the secretary’s office by the time next season begins.”

  McRoy himself tried to backtrack, swearing to reporters, “I hadn’t heard from the Royal Rooters representative up until 12:45 at which hour I saw the bundle of tickets allotted to them on my desk. I didn’t want to get stuck with the tickets so at one o’clock I sent one of the clerks to tell the policemen to throw the section reserved for the rooters to the public.” There was one problem with that: He was lying. McRoy, and McAleer, knew full well the Rooters were coming. They’d sold the seats because they figured the Rooters wouldn’t mind standing, because they figured they could treat their most loyal supporters any way they wanted to. It was Timothy Mooney, chief of the Bureau of Information in the mayor’s office, who exposed the ruse. “I called up the office of the secretary at noon and received the usual block of tickets for the Rooters,” he said. “I signed for them. McRoy doesn’t know what he is talking about.”